The funding configuration method: Tracing and visualizing all research grants of individual researchers

Abstract

Many scientific researchers are involved in multiple grants at once. This paper offers a novel method to trace, visualize, and understand such researcher funding configurations. Existing methods, which draw upon funding acknowledgments and funder databases, are insufficient to capture how much and what kinds of grants individual researchers have. They have led actors to underestimate funding concentration and overestimate the impact of single grants. The funding configuration method remedies these shortcomings and illuminates potential cross-grant influences (e.g., via complementary grant conditions). Cross-grant flows of money, people, infrastructure, and knowledge are part of how competitive funding shapes knowledge production. Hence, this new method is vital to understand contexts in which researchers tap into multiple funding streams and projects at the same time. The method can inform both detailed analysis of smaller samples, large-scale studies of funding configurations, and future AI automation.